nature, Photography

Colourful Barberry

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Barberry can show an interesting autumn colour palette. Some shrubs turn a uniformly scarlet red while others develop multi-hued leaves.

I love the mixture of red, pink, yellow and green shown here but barberry can also be quite purplish as you can see from the featured photo.

I always wish that autumn could last a bit longer so that we could really take in the colours but of course we humans in that case probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much!

I find these red-speckled autumn barberry leaves lovely. They’re decaying, but they’re displaying so much beauty, too.

A faded ginkgo biloba leaf is caught in the barberry shrub, making for a lovely colour counterpoint.

Happy Sunday.

59 thoughts on “Colourful Barberry”

        1. No worries. This is how they look. 😊 I was tempted to brighten them a bit because I took the photos in quite low light conditions but in the end decided that they didn’t need any adjustment. Cheers.

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          1. I’m so glad you left them be….For years i used to love looking through the entrants/winners of photography competitions and then got totally put off by obvious tweaks…Your photograph is glorious x

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          2. Thank you very much, Joey. 😊 I understand. I take pictures of plants, flowers, landscapes, skyscapes that I just like; they don’t usually need much adjustment since they’re already beautiful or at least I think they are. 😊 Cheers.

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  6. Good colour. An odd thing about barberry, Berberis darwinii: My wife was weeding under a large bush and endured many prickles from the thorns – none terribly deep or damaging – but she later broke out in a very sore rash which covered her entire upper body. It cleared with anti-histamine medication.

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    1. I didn’t know that but am not surprised since we humans can potentially be allergic to anything. I’m glad to hear that your wife’s reaction cleared up with anti-histamine medication. It sounds like that rash was nasty.

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  7. Dear Lynette
    We have mixed feelings towards barberry. We love the colours, but we hate the thorns – it’s like with roses.
    The Fab Four of Cley
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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    1. Hello Fab Four, yes, every rose has its thorns – unless you have a thornless cultivar! The Japanese barberry (berberis thunbergii) pictured is naturally thornless and has also been sterilised since they are invasive here, so they’re quite benign. Cheers.

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    1. Yes, that would be true in Calgary and generally in Alberta, too. I love how bright they become, also. I recently found out that it’s illegal to sell them in Canada (unless it’s the sterilised cultivar – the ones pictured are) because they’re causing significant problems in the wild in a number of places.

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        1. I read about an invasive plant contractor company hired this summer to go through the provincial parks in the valley to look for and remove invasive plants, shrubs and trees. They were apparently so busy that the number of people employed doubled in size from about 50 to a hundred. There’s a municipal push now as well as numerous volunteer groups doing the same. I knew there were invasives around but I didn’t realise that the problem was so bad!

          I think that invasives in Alberta are more controlled because winters will tend to knock them out in the wild and I also seem to remember that municipal governments had tighter controls around what were deemed “noxious plants and trees.” I’m starting to think that here, proliferation has been quite ignored for a long time.

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    1. I recently learned that it’s illegal to sell them in Canada – has been since 2019, I think – unless they are one of the sterilised cultivars (the ones pictured are, apparently). I understand that they are causing serious problems in the wild because they grow in dense thickets and force out native plants. I like these, though. They’re so pretty and bright.

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